Bugs are literally everywhere. They're on your sheets (probably), they're waiting in the dark corners of your shoes, they're hiding in pantry doors ready to jump out at you as if they've been spring-loaded and now, if you have rosacea, they might even be crawling in your pores, dying and leaving their bacteria-bloated corpses behind to foul up your glands.

According to a new study published in the Journal of Medical Microbiology, tiny mites that live on most of our faces (you're welcome, fellow squeamish people of the world) spend their days napping in the comfy, cozy glands that produce sweat and sebum. These mites carry a certain kind of bacteria (Demodex folliculorum) in their digestive tracts, which spills out of their bodies like piñata candy when the mites die because, and this is super interesting, the mites don't have any anuses. The bacteria released through this grotesque process, suggests this study, is responsible for rosacea.

People who suffer from rosacea, says study author Kevin Kavanagh from the National University of Ireland, have a particularly high concentration of these exploding, anusless mites crawling in and out of their pores:

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In normal skin, the density of mites is low. In rosacea there is a high density and therefore a large number of bacteria are released. We believe that the high level of bacterial toxins overwhelms the immune response and leads to the inflammation. It is interesting to note that [the mites] do not have an anus and therefore all their waste is stored until they die and then it is released in one go.

Skin problems like rosacea only occur when mites die in pores during the day. At night, the mites are on the prowl for mates, covering as much as four inches of distance every time you bed down and dream pleasant dreams about being a discrete entity rather than an eclectic colony of microscopic life forms. Kavanagh's study also explains why rosacea antibiotics have only a desultory effect, since they most likely kill the bacteria that produce the toxins, but not the mites, which people with rosacea — their faces being the hottest fuck-spots for tiny mites — can pick up again from friends and relatives